Jim arrived just at dawn so we got our walk in while we waited for the bogs to attract some birds. I guess the most interesting birds we saw as we walk around the village, the Lower Meadow, and the Triangle Field, were an influx of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers and the Common Raven croaking overhead. Aside from that, it was the usual "tweety" birds and none of them in particularly big numbers.
By the time we were heading out of the village the winds were picking up, it felt to me from out of the west, and the skies looked ominous, though the radar showed no rain in the vicinity. Back on the dam between the Middle & Lower Bogs we met Tom who had the usual assortment of expected shorebirds, though there was an unusually high number of White-rumped Sandpipers (4 that we could see in one scan sweep).
For the last week or so there has also been a Green-winged Teal hanging with the fluctuating Mallard flock, distinguished only by size up until today when there were two occasionally flashing the traffic light green on the wings. Otherwise, in eclipse, they are just a duck sp. Okay, a small duck sp.
Eventually, it seems, if you hang around long enough staring at the shallow pools, the mud, and the grass, something other than a peep or a yellowlegs will miraculously appear and finally today, after about an hour of scoping, Tom found a Buff-breasted Sandpiper. We never saw it come in. (And when it disappeared around noon, we never saw it fly out.) The bird was at first in at the edge of the water but soon flew into the short grass at the eastern end of the bog. No matter where we stood when we circled the bog, it was always halfway out, too far for me, at least, to get more than a doc shot. We circled the bog partly to investigate one curious sandpiper that had an injured leg and was hopping around as it fed. Because the bill seemed longer than a Semi Sand's, it had the potential to be a Western Sandpiper, but none of the other field marks, after extensive study, were showing so we had to let it go as an enfeebled Semipalmated Sandpiper. Later, after I left some other birders who had come for the now absent Buffy found a Western Sandpiper, presumably able to use both legs since none of their notes indicate a limp.
Buff-breasted Sandpiper is one of the birds I obsessively search for at Whitesbog--it means I don't have to make myself miserable searching the sod farms of Monmouth County for a year bird. American Golden-Plover is also in that category. Last year I found them both in the same day. This year I will continue to circle the bogs until I do--or they get filled.
For the day, 51 species. Usually the sunrise over the Upper Bog is quite a picture. Today, the darkness just turned to a light shade of gray.
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